Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture.

• Author: Meacham, Jon

By Peter Applebome Times Books, $25

The old man's eyes were watery, his Coke can halfempty, the soggy Garcia y Vega cigar unlit. He grimaced, and shifted his gaunt frame, awkwardly adjusting his synthetic gray suit coat. George Wallace was in pain, of course; had been, constantly, since that day in 1972 when a would-be assassin fired five bullets into him. It was an autumn morning last year--the kind of warm but brisk Southern fall day natives call "sweater weather"--and I was in Montgomery to meet the ancient former Alabama governor. The voice that had once so effectively taunted "pointyheaded pseudo-intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight" was gone now, replaced by the hoarsest of whispers; disease had gnawed away at his throat.

But glory was not far from his mind--or his gaze. Dominating the office was a huge oil portrait of virile Wallace in his prime. His hair was coal-black, slicked into a pompadour; he wore a skinny, early sixties tie; most important, he stood before a blood-red Alabama flag and the gubernatorial seal. And so history blended with legend, as it does so often in the old Confederacy. The fact of the old man trapped in a steel wheelchair, rasping out words, dueled with the mythic image of power. I was there to try to reconstruct how Wallace had played the press, and I asked him whether, with the benefit of years, he thought national reporters had had the story of the South in the fifties and sixties right. Did they get it? "I don't think they ever understood the South," he wheezed, pulling at his can of Coca-Cola. "Course, they understood more after I ran for president. They understood a lot more then."

That is dead-on history. It's become something of a cliche to point out that the South may have really won the Civil War: The center of political power has moved, along with millions of people, from the Northeast corridor and the industrial Midwest to the shiny suburbs of the Sunbelt. States' rights has become respectable: Now it's called "devolution." The fire-eating rhetoric that led to Sumter is now relatively common, even in moderate Democratic circles. Meanwhile, Southerners dominate politics: The President is an Arkansan, the vice president a Tennessean, the speaker of the House a Georgian, the Senate majority leader a Mississippian. And so to understand America, you must first understand the South.

That is Peter Applebome's thesis, and there are few journalists at work in the country today better...